The Museum of Modern Life

The Museum of Modern Life was part museum, part time capsule and part artwork. Responding to my degree show piece that asked people what they thought the role of art is, I found that most people thought art has to be aesthetic and meaningful/useful. One more interesting argument was that every artwork is simply a historical document - a response to the society and social background of the era it was created in. With these in minds, I created a museum of modern life, detailing aspects of politics, conflict, the environment, global issues and our lifestyle. The museum was mounted on castors and aside from being exhibited in the graduate Free Range exhibition in the Truman Brewery, I also wheeled it and showed it around public areas of London.

Free Range 2011 - The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London

Last week I participated in 'Seventy Feet', a graduate fine art show made up of Bath Spa University students, and exhibited as part of 'Free Range' in the Old Truman Brewery.  The show was a huge success, with many artists getting commissions and exhibition offers as a result of the show.  Here are some pictures from 'Seventy Feet', featuring some of the best graduate art in the whole building!

Adam Hughes

Charlotte Bartrop

Jenny Cooper

Jenny Cooper (Top)

Michala Pike (Bottom)

Kerry King (Top)

Amreen Khan (Bottom)

Megan Hoyle

Natalia Komis

Nick Stamp

Nick Stamp (Top)

Lauren Hudson (Bottom)

Rachel Evans

Unart

Much of my artwork is constricted by a bulk of theory.  I keep mentioning the importance of creating art that can be seen as more than art so that more people can read into it and understand it.  Here's an extract from my theory writings, an explanation of what I term as 'Unart'.

Unart

Recently, I was asked what I considered to be the most successful piece of art I have ever encountered.  Although I have never witnessed it in the flesh, my response was a Jeremy Deller piece that featured on the London Underground.  I cannot remember its title, or the year in which it ran.  I know that it was only implemented on the Piccadilly Line.  The actual piece itself was a spoken artwork.  And I use the term ‘artwork’ very loosely.  The drivers of the Underground trains were given a book of (I think existentialist) philosophy, and they were told to scatter their daily tube announcements of “Mind the gap” and “Keep clear of the closing doors” with snippets of wisdom from this book.

I was asked where I’d read or heard about this ‘artwork’.  My answer was again a little uninformed, but I remembered reading a newspaper article by the comedian Arthur Smith as he spent a day as a tube driver’s assistant, helping them with the announcements from Jeremy Deller’s book of selected philosophy.  I also remember Arthur Smith writing that he’d read a piece over the train tannoy that dealt with ‘looking into the void’ (I think by Kant), then following this by announcing “Please mind the gap”.

This is perhaps my first recollection of hearing about what I term as ‘unart’.

In another discussion, my own practice was being scrutinised, and the flaws in my work bore down to associations with strategies (systems of operations and their methods) that I was trying to avoid (namely materialism and consumerism, but also elitist art).  To fight against a strategy, Michel De Certeau and John Berger advocate tactics: methods of resistance that don’t subvert, but instead oppose the strategy in question.  For example, when trying to form a piece that resists/opposes consumerism, it has to be without any consumer value or material worth, and without any of the glossy appeal that consumerism holds.  Therefore it cannot be a manipulated by consumerism, or hold any associations with consumerism.

But this conjured new challenges.  My problem was that the tactics I was using (making personal and individual artworks that were intimate and sometimes made the viewer uncomfortable) were being associated with a different system: activism.  And this association wrapped around my work and clouded it.

Back to Jeremy Deller’s London Underground philosophy.

Imagine that you were a philosopher sitting on a Piccadilly Line tube train.  And you heard a piece of Deller’s collected philosophy float out over the tannoy.  Would you associate this philosophical statement as being the work of a philosopher?

Or imagine that you were a poet sitting on a Piccadilly Line tube train.  And you heard a piece of Deller’s collected philosophy float out over the tannoy.  Would you associate this philosophical statement as being the work of a poet?

The success of Deller’s ‘artwork’ is that it can be considered as not being an artwork.  In short, it is unart.

The unart has dual importance.  Firstly, that it can be disassociated with its original intention.  In the case of Deller’s tube philosophy, it can be disassociated with being art.  Secondly, the unassociation can bridge new ground and form new links to other subjects.  The tube philosophy can be linked to philosophy, poetry, social activism, the individuality of the tube driver and therefore human nature, existentialism and back to art.

But there is another important aspect of unart: it can still be art.

Unart is therefore the most successful way of being a tactic (a method of opposition to a strategy).  Unart has the ability to be read as one of a number of classifications (was Deller’s piece art, philosophy, poetry or activism?), and these multi-layered connections break and weaken the links of association that surround the piece of unart.  In layman’s terms, unart can have a greater number of links to other subjects.  This means that the piece of unart loses any strong association with one subject in particular.  Also, it can be read and understood by more people because it can be seen as having more than one classification.

As a method for fighting against the systems that I oppose, unart is an ideal vehicle for implementing my theory.  It does not use tactics that are the tools of consumerism or mass media, it can sustain that handmade element and can become part of community and society based artwork, simply by its ability to be so widely read.

What Is The Role Of Art Today?

As opposed as I am to the associations of elitism that surround fine art, particularly those pieces that are designed for the ‘white cube’ of a standard gallery space, producing a piece for my degree show was proving to be quite a headache.  Although I didn’t want to create a piece that could only read as an art work, by putting work into any of the gallery-like spaces I was being offered was limiting the associations that my piece could carry to just one: fine art.

The solution lay in creating something that resisted the gallery setting and managed to latch onto associations outside of fine art.  The result was a set of photocopied and hand-printed documents which were distributed around the university, and myself sat at a desk in my exhibition space.  The documents set up some simple starter arguments that asked people to examine the role of art today, and them come up to have a chat with me at my desk.  I used Francis Alÿs and Jeremy Deller on one side (representing art with social function) and Martin Creed on the other (representing art without function outside aesthetics and artistic conceptual understanding).  The main bulk of the text was photocopied, but the title, image and an invitation to have a discussion with myself at my desk was hand-printed.

The discussions that arose from the piece were fascinating.  My set-up of just me, a desk and some chairs in my white exhibition space was much different from the rest of the show, and this clearly threw some people.  But generally people were interested to see what I was up to, I tried my best to be friendly and invite people to sit down and have a chat.  It definitely wasn’t just a performance artwork but a survey as well, and the document confirmed this separate association.  I talked with people about many different aspects of modern art and from the conversations I had over the week of the show, I pulled out some common themes.

Not everyone will agree with this, but common recurrences in opinion suggested 3 refrains:

-          Aesthetics.  Art should hold onto the tradition of creating something that has visual interest, whether that is pure aesthetics or anti-aesthetic.

-          Meaning.  Art should examine or illustrate subject matter that is important and meaningful.  This could be subjects that are difficult to tackle in other mediums (film, music, etc) or topics that are involved in current issues.

-          Documentation.  An interesting point raised was that every artwork ever created is simply an echo/resistance of the time it was created in.  The further in the past an artwork was made, the more of a historical document it is.  At a certain age, the weight of history associated with an artwork can outweigh the art itself.

As I was going to be exhibiting in another exhibition 3 weeks later, I decided to create a piece that was dictated by these constraints.  Art for the people by the people?  Or as my document suggested, could I simply be pampering to mass tastes?

Worker Posters

I designed this piece to be a protest.  The idea is that by pasting the posters around town, especially near McDonalds and Starbucks (the settings in the posters), I would be create an awareness into the concept of work, particularly our reasons for working poor jobs for little money.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille comments on something he calls the accursed share.  He argues along the lines of excess energy being a necessity.  A system must produce more than enough energy that the amount needed to create its basic requirements, e.g. a chicken must lay 5 eggs in order for one to hatch.  If every chicken laid 4 eggs, they would die out.  If each chicken laid more than 5 eggs then chickens will multiply.  If we take the same basis into economics, then any capital-based system must produce more than enough energy (money) to support its civilisation.  The gap between the minimum needed and the amount actually produced Bataille calls the accursed share, and he argues that this is a necessity.  This is the share which sustains luxury and excess, and is the share which accounts for the types of jobs that I wanted my posters to aim at.

Too often, we deem such jobs a necessity.  But in reality, they are not.  They are a luxury that supports another luxury.  Films like Fight Club deal with this issue, and to quote one famous line from the film (and book), “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need”.  Nicely put, and the kind of sentiment that is reflected in Bataille’s philosophy, and what I wanted to utilise in this piece.

The reason for the posters being based on a painting rather than on a photograph is to echo, in some small aspect, socialist realist painting.  From the 1930s, communistic countries (especially Russia) enforced this form of art that was always very positive, flattering and realistic.  It was used as a kind of propaganda to show how great communism was, when the reality was usually far from this.  The settings that both workers in my posters are placed are quite bright, light places.  I contrasted this with the mellow tones of the faces and the glum expressions.  It is easy to read and quite strong visually, and this ties in with my low-tech approach, making accessible and easily understood artwork.

During the occasions I protested against the cuts to education in London, I realised that there is an importance to physicality, in sheer presence.  That is one of the reasons why the paintings have been reproduced as posters.  The other is that they need to be read in my unart philosophy.  If they existed as paintings, they would be too close to fine art and would not be able to read as the protest that they are intended to be read as.  As a result the original paintings have been destroyed.  They were simply the means to producing the posters, and if they were to be shown as paintings they would do something completely different from my original intention.

The posters were pasted up around town, especially near McDonalds and Starbucks (the settings of the paintings).  I pasted them up on a Sunday night, and when I went to photograph them early next morning, only one survived.  The ones which had been pasted up on properties had been removed, but the one which survived I’d posted on a deserted shop.  I couldn’t help thinking about Lenin’s “When there is no property, there is no state.”  The next week I headed into town again and posted more copies up, this time focussing on walls which didn’t belong to any businesses.

Nebulae Website

In a collaboration project with Matthew Johnson, a graphic designer, we have been building a website that exists to explore different online systems.  Whereas most websites are linear and webbed (it gives you an option, you follow it, you can click ‘back’ to return to the previous page), our website attempts to try a new system.  The aim is that the website is not clearly or easily navigable, but instead tries to decipher the emotions and interests of the viewer by presenting them with a tangled mass of options, and then loads selected pages from a cache that deal with their selected interest/emotion.

It sounds complicated, but the upshot is that the website will constantly present the viewer with new information which will interest him/her, but the viewer does not have control over which pages are loaded.

The nebulae website is still a work in progress, but here are some of the pages that will be used.

Environmental Time Capsule (2050)

2050 is turning into a deadline year for the planet.  Scientists predict that if global temperatures rise above 2°C by 2050 (which is a probability) then we will witness unalterable climate change, mass extinctions and sea level rises.  Governments have been planning strategies to make sure that a 2°C temperature rise will not happen, but this process has been hindered by international disagreements.

The time capsule contains booklets that simply record predictions of global warming and our methods of combating climate change.  When it is opened in 2050, future generations will be able see where their predecessors triumphed and failed.  The capsule is buried in the grounds of Bath Spa University, on the slope towards the lake, just down from the Italian Gardens.